Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

News of the Weird

Posted on July 23, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

A woman is suing JetBlue for making her prove to them that she was wearing underwear.

The strange thing about this story is that it didn’t happen in Florida.

Oh wait. It was a flight from LaGuardia to Florida. So that’s OK then.

Posted in Law: Right to Travel | Comments Off on News of the Weird

Cynical. But Wrong?

Posted on July 23, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

Jonathan Schwarz offers a very cynical contrast in Barack Obama Is Powerless Before the Majesty of the Law, contrasting (1) Obama’s acceptance of the (IMHO correct) advice of (all of?) his lawyers that he should not rely on an interpretation of the 14th Amendment that would have allowed him to raise the debt ceiling unilaterally with (2) Obama’s rejection of the (IMHO correct) advice of (most of) his lawyers that he lacked the authority to bomb Libya unilaterally.

Schwartz’s conclusion: “Of course, as people with a sophisticated understanding of the law know, there’s a huge difference between ignoring the debt ceiling and bombing Libya. For instance: Obama wants to bomb Libya.”

To be fair, the consensus on the 14th Amendment issue is probably wider than on the War Powers issue, but even so.

Posted in Law: Constitutional Law, Politics: US | 2 Comments

Shorter Obama Press Conference

Posted on July 22, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

“I tried repeatedly to surrender to the House GOP, but they wouldn’t take even my most abject surrender. I have summoned them back to the White House tomorrow morning in another attempt to force them to accept it. If worst comes to worst, and they will not accept my surrender, I am prepared to accept theirs, but I really don’t like it, and will use the opportunity to campaign against Democratic values in the next election.”

Posted in 2012 Election, Econ & Money | 15 Comments

Come on Down, it’s Cool Here

Posted on July 22, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

Apparently, large chunks of the US are hotter than Miami this week.


Seems unnatural, somehow.

Posted in Miami | 1 Comment

FL-25 Looks Attractive for Democrats

Posted on July 21, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

Federal investigators have opened a second criminal probe of U.S. Rep. David Rivera

See More FBI trouble for Rep. David Rivera | Florida politics blog: The Buzz | tampabay.com & St. Petersburg Times.

State Rep. Luis Garcia has already announced he’s running (feel the excitement), and Annette Taddeo is said to be thinking about it.

Posted in Politics: FL-25/FL-27 | Comments Off on FL-25 Looks Attractive for Democrats

Done Tweaking?

Posted on July 21, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

I got the load time down from 9+ seconds (according to Pingdom) to something in the 2-4 second range. Where it falls in that range seems to depend on the atmospheric pressure.

To achieve this result, I took the following steps:

  • Tweaked some W3 Total Cache settings
  • Stopped banging my head against the W3 Total Cache minification settings, and fired up the WP Minify plugin instead.
  • Swapped out the two slowest design elements for faster lower-tech versions
    1. Put in the HTML version of Sitemeter instead of the Javascript version
    2. Used the sfw of the clock instead of the Javascript version
  • Removed the archive drop-down, which amazingly was responsible about half of the HTML for this page, although it showed up as only one line in the margin if you didn’t click it. Now, instead I have a new freestanding archive page via WP-Archives. This is one part of the revision that still needs work — right now it takes waaay too long to build the archive page when someone visits it, and I fear it could bring the server to its knees if some malicious robot decided to hit it a lot (I have set it to noindex, nofollow and blacklisted it in robots.txt, but that only works for good robots).
  • Installed the Wp Smush.it plugin to automate the reduction of image file sizes that I was doing manually with the GIMP
  • Moved some static files to Amazon S3 & CloudFront, for a cost of a penny or two per day — unless of course traffic should go up all of a sudden.

I picked Amazon because it is integrated with my server and also W3 Total cache. But the user interface is awful and the help files are hard going. I’m still not sure I’ve set things up right.

Stopwatch copyright © 2009 casey.marshall. Some rights reserved.

Posted in Discourse.net, Wordpress | 1 Comment